Norah Jones Feels Like Home (Blue Note)
In two short years, Norah Jones went from playing clubs as an unknown to becoming a ubiquitous, insanely heralded new artist and the prime torch carrier for "grown-folks' music." Most of the praise was for Jones' voice: You put on her 8 million-selling, eight-Grammy-winning 2001 debut, Come Away With Me, to be transported by that tousled half-whisper and by the twenty-four-year-old's affectation-free Texas-saloon-chanteuse vibe. The surrounding musical embellishments might as well have been ring tones.
But singing doesn't just happen: It needs context, and this could be Jones' particular genius; she is as much a piano player as a singer, despite her best efforts to hide this fact -- in performance she slinks behind the piano and does her thing with undivalike anonymity. Far from blanded-out background music, Feels Like Home, Jones' second album, is a triumph of the low-key, at once easygoing and poignant.
Jones, her bandmates and producer Arif Mardin take what might seem like unexceptional acoustic-lounge arrangements and turn them into high drama. The gorgeous "Those Sweet Words," one of several songs Jones co-wrote with her boyfriend and bassist, Lee Alexander, is a good example. It begins as an ordinary singer-songwriter tangle of acoustic guitars, ambling along in the medium-slow tempo that became, from overuse, her Achilles' heel. Jones enters by pawing delicately at a single note, then plays idle throwaway chords that exude a round, almost liquid tone you rarely hear from a piano. They're just random jazz-piano jottings, yet from them Jones creates the outline of a sullen, disconsolate scene. The hard work of framing a narrative backdrop is done. All that remains is for Jones to heave that heavy sigh and fill in the details.
Feels Like Home is a series of these carefully drawn mood states, each one set in a slightly different shade of blue and differentiated by subtle changes in the arrangements. Though the originals, written mostly by members of her touring band, lack some of the earnest grabbiness of the songs Jesse Harris wrote for Jones' first foray, they're far more varied musically, and they depend on Jones' magic, her ability to invest the most fragile melody with some preternatural impact. There are moments of lithe, coolheaded boho blues ("In the Morning," featuring a coy Jones solo on Wurlitzer electric piano) and downcast salvation-seeking waltzes (the transfixing "Humble Me"). There's a credible excursion into country two-step (the duet with Dolly Parton, "Creepin' In") and a haunted Brechtian tone poem called "Carnival Town."
Jones talks about her whirlwind success just a little, with her usual understatement: On the idyllic "Toes," she sings of an idealized, unharried life not in the strident complaining voice of a newly minted star but like any other overwhelmed soul yearning for a moment's peace.
The most heartening thing about Feels Like Home is the utter absence of fussiness, or second-album overthink. It extends the Come Away With Me template while never echoing the earlier songs. Where most creators of vocal pop music concentrate on crafting tight couplets and big-payoff refrains, Jones just sits at the piano and chases less obvious targets -- ruminative moods and hushed-whisper atmospheres. And she's found, in two graceful albums, a whole different kind of mojo lurking inside the three-minute song. (TOM MOON)
Courtney Love America's Sweetheart (Virgin)
When the Rolling Stones released Sticky Fingers in 1971, Keith Richards mused, "I don't think Sticky Fingers is a heavy drug album any more than the world is a heavy world." So let's just say that Courtney Love's long-delayed comeback, America's Sweetheart, comes from a heavy, heavy world indeed. You'd have to go back to Sticky Fingers to find a major-label album so saturated in the slow-motion drug ambience of the sleazy rock underworld. It will surprise anybody who expected Love to clean up her act after so many years as a tabloid spectacle. She sounds ragged, unsteady, slurring her words. In "Hello," she howls, "I got no desires no more" -- and hearing is believing.
For her official solo debut, Love called in the pros: Matchbox Twenty producer Matt Serletic, ex-boyfriend/producer Jim Barber, Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin, Christina Aguilera hitmaker Linda Perry. But despite all the producers and song doctors, Sweetheart seems tired. Love chronicles life in the Hollywood fast lane, with sordid tales such as "Mono" and "All the Drugs." "The Plague" ends with Love mumbling, "All my love's in vain/Cannot find a vein." "Sunset Strip" is a rock version of Patty Duke's meltdown at the end of Valley of the Dolls, as Love screams, "I got pills for my coochie 'cause, baby, I'm sore/I got pills 'cause you're bad/ I got pills 'cause I'm bored!"
But the shocker is Love's ravaged voice. No matter what you've heard about her real-life problems, nothing could prepare you for how busted up she sounds. Hell, it took Rod Stewart thirty years of rum-and-Cokes and Swedish models to do this kind of number on his throat. Her voice gets processed through filters and overdubs, but she's still in rough shape, stumbling over consonants and running out of breath. Whenever she tries a ballad -- "Hold On to Me," "Never Gonna Be the Same" -- it's ghastly. Elsewhere, she keeps turning on the scream to cover up for the mediocre tunes. Her best riff shows up on "I'll Do Anything," which sounds like an old song you may remember called "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
For people who enjoy watching celebrities fall apart, America's Sweetheart should be more fun than an Osbournes marathon. But strange as it seems today, Courtney Love used to have something to say, voicing her female audience's fantasies of freedom and power. On Hole's 1994 masterpiece, Live Through This, she inhabited teenage misfits, bored housewives and beauty queens with total conviction. But on America's Sweetheart, she can't find the emotional intensity that made her a star. So she settles for the role of a hapless circus act staggering down the red carpet -- and Paris Hilton does it better. (ROB SHEFFIELD)
Kylie Minogue Body Language (Capitol)
Baseball greats Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas were both born on May 27th, 1968. Dance-pop queen Kylie Minogue was born the next day -- but against all odds, she's aging even more gracefully than they are. Her fantastic new Body Language comes hot on the stilettos of her biggest and best hit ever, "Can't Get You Out of My Head," the 2001 smash where this tiny Australian bombshell finally conquered America. On her latest album, she turns up the heat, working her seductive voice in Prince-style electro-glitz disco gems such as "Slow" and "Secret (Take You Home)." At thirty-five, she's ten times hotter than she was ten years ago -- on Body Language, Kylie Minogue definitely sounds like she has a few more tricks stored on her hard drive than Britney or Christina. (ROB SHEFFIELD)
David Guetta Just a Little More Love (Astralwerks)
In the mid-Eighties the American dance music bubbling out of Detroit, Chicago and New York took a trip to the U.K. and came back as the rave movement. Now French DJ/producer, David Guetta is reintroducing the dirty beats and heady vocals of gay house music to the masses, and damn if it doesn't feel pretty good. Guetta's Just a Little More Love evokes memories of New York clubs, starting with the Loft and Paradise Garage ("Love Don't Let Me Go") and ending with Junior Vasquez throwing down at Twilo (the title track, and the raw, raunchy "It's Alright," featuring diva vocalist Barbara Tucker). Unlike his Parisian pals Cassius, Ludovic Navarre and the men of Daft Punk, Guetta is less worried about creating something original and more about introducing a new generation of club kids to the soulful history of American dance music via Paris and Ibiza. At times, Just a Little More Love is a bit too scattered. But like the tracks that Guetta created and sampled on the dancefloor, he stands tall. (ANDREW STRICKMAN)
Black 47 New York Town (Gadfly)
With their blend of Celtic instrumentation, reggae rhythms and Jersey Shore horn rock, Black 47 is New York City's most enduring bar band. After nearly fifteen years at its helm, author/playwright/Irish ex-patriate Larry Kirwan still warbles rather than sings and still proves that drinking sometimes equals thinking. New York Town, the band's eleventh album, is part immigrant experience and part response to 9/11. Kirwan calls this record a love letter to NYC -- outer boroughs included. David Johansen's "Staten Island Baby" is as uncultivated as the island itself. Roseanne Cash puts a heartbreaking spin on "Fiona's Song," a tale of a Queens barfly. Kirwan and singer Mary Courtney play a Bronx couple engaged in a comic lover's quarrel on "Livin' in America -- 11 Years on." Suzzy Roche whispers to Kirwan's broken heart on "Brooklyn, Goodbye." And the best story is saved for Manhattan's East Village -- with cheating, stalking and a double homicide, "Blood Wedding" has it all. New York Town may not have the manic energy of Black 47's earlier releases, but it's an entertaining, if sometimes melancholy, tour New York. (MEREDITH OCHS)
Lucy Kaplansky The Red Thread (Red House)
New York singer-songwriter Lucy Kaplansky wrote most of her fifth, full-length album as the dust of 9/11 cleared and her adopted daughter came into her life. The resulting album is an emotional testament to survival, family and New York. On "This Is Home," she details meeting her husband and describes finding her daughter in a Chinese orphanage. "This is home/Let's make a family/Baby you and me," she sings, the chorus revealing its haunting double meaning. On the piano-based "Brooklyn Train," Kaplansky testifies to the bond of all New Yorkers "down below on iron veins . . . safe in the body of New York again." Elsewhere, she successfully interprets premier contemporary songwriters Bill Morrissey, James McMurtry, Dave Carter and Buddy Miller. The Red Thread is Kaplansky's best, most fully realized yet -- even when it rocks & rolls, it's as warm and tasty as cinnamon tea, as hopeful as daybreak. (TODD SPENCER)
Apartment 26 Music for the Massive (Atlantic)
Massive is the operative word for the music on the second full-length effort by this intrepid British outfit. The most engaging tracks craftily combine a colorful assortment of stylistic elements: deep hulking grooves, doses of swinging rhythms, vocals that shift from a gnarly snarl to a dapper warble at the drop of a chorus, outbursts of gritty guitar riffage, and keyboards that deftly mimic an array of sounds, from flashy brass solos to ambient noises. "Axel Off" is a hefty industrial dance number spiked with funky piano embellishments, and "Close Your Eyes" intersperses chunky grinding with some breezy, jazz-tinged moments punctuated in places by the delicate clatter of castanets. Early Nine Inch Nails and Rob Zombie come to mind more than a few times, but rather than coming off like a dull experiment in musical cloning, Apartment 26 play like a healthy hybrid that's slowly developing from the best features of its progenitors. (SANDY MASUO)
(February 9, 2004)
